Abundance arises when the Soul connects to Spirit and expresses its potential by bringing forth original impulses, new life, creative solutions, innovations and beauty. It comes about when the Soul learns to master and maintain a precarious balance of power and love at its every decision point.

An overdose of power kills love, yielding force, lack of Spirit, bitterness and obtuseness. Many Souls today are in such state where doing replaces creating, force kills Spirit, and focus on security, order, matter and social strata cuts potential. Such Souls are often like caged birds, devoid of purpose as driven by power and mind dominance. To make up for a deprived Spirit, they engage in body activities or travel to spirited destinations, imbibing the life bestowed by sunshine and their hosts’ love temperaments. They tend consume en masse, unable to connect to meaning and experience true fulfillment.

At the other end, an overdose of love at the cost of power brings an emphasis on receiving pleasure, which drowns the Soul in sensual stimulation and expression at the cost of integrity, values, structure, progress and prosperity. Such Souls tend to be home to exuberance and effervescence but also material lack and impotence, begging the powerful ones for money and connections, selling their resources, bodies, affection and talents and losing independence and self-worth in the process.

The recipe for abundance is simple: it is born at the place where power meets love in equal measure and together they give rise to life. Embedded in this process are two major conditions: the meeting as equals, and the giving rise to life. The achievement of equality is as delicate as it is priceless, for it depends solely on the appreciation of both sides for each other. Whenever appreciation is missing, each side will be prone to use rather than enrich the other, causing wounding and instilling evil will for revenge and vindication. Thus as long as appreciation is absent, there will be no insemination of abundance and the act of life creation will be aborted.

Yet appreciation, as a state of consciousness, is rarely contemplated in its deeper Truth and is always mistaken for one’s desire for the consumption of whatever trait the other has that one lacks and needs. For every Soul appreciates something as long as it provides fulfillment of a need or relief from a pain, i.e. as long as it holds some value in the eye of the receiver. Tied thus to the value derived, such ‘appreciation’ is born, thrives, diminishes and dies along with the needs and desires of the beholder and the perceived usefulness of the provider. When needs are fulfilled, perceptions changed or taste buds exhausted, desire diminishes, inducing cruelty in the beholder as he searches for new sources of fulfillment. The hitherto appreciated provider remains discarded and heartbroken, believing himself used and worthless. Such appreciation, therefore, was a mere seeking to receive from another regardless of the cost and wounding imparted on them i.e. without responsibility for the other’s wellbeing and wholeness.

In contrast, a Soul’s true appreciation can readily be deduced from the area of its commitment: a wealthy person’s true appreciation is of money and power, and an artist’s true appreciation of the vibration of feelings. While they might desire each other for a temporary fulfillment of needs, in Truth they do not appreciate the other’s gifts. For if they did, the powerful Soul would commit to Spirit in the form of seeking a higher purpose, rather than merely soothe its need for Spirit by consuming art and pleasure while continuing to engage in what it really appreciates, which is amassing power. And the artist Soul would commit to power by cultivating its connection to Spirit for the purpose of attaining wisdom, rather than merely soothe its need for power by catering art to wealthy Souls while continuing to flutter in feelings, devoid of significance and potency.

Their underlying need for Spirit and power, so easily silenced by means of consuming another’s services, is in fact a guidance by Spirit to grow and develop true potency within, thereby ridding themselves of need. Yet this potential will go unfulfilled as long as merely soothed by means of substitutes, in this case feelings instead of purpose and money instead of wisdom. Its choice against potential cuts the Soul from Spirit and sentences it to infertility, a gradual decay in vitality amidst an existence in stagnation.

The second condition to abundance, the giving rise to life, builds upon the first. Once mutual appreciation and commitment to growth is established, Souls need to make a second commitment, namely to the channeling and expression of life. Commitment to life is necessary because all change, and especially the birth of the original, the genius, the innovative, comes via an often uncomfortable busting of the old and a necessary loss of power and pleasure, followed by a gradual incubation of the new.

Lack of commitment sabotages the birth of abundance during this incubation phase, when the Soul’s fear of suffering undermines its endurance and seduces it into force and sacrifice, akin to a pregnant mother who aborts the baby due to the discomforts of pregnancy.

A Soul that aspires abundance must be willing and able to suspend the instantaneous placation of its fears and needs, and accept self-worth tensions while patiently incubating new seeds of life, genius and potential. If such pains and tensions are not borne by the Soul, life will be thwarted and the Soul steeped in lack and impotence.